13 partners, 18 months, one mission: our new consortium-led Transform-ER project aims to enable one million home upgrades every year by 2030. This blog series tells the stories of our tactical team of partners and the retrofit barriers they are addressing – so let us introduce the Manufacturing Technology Centre!
Our Meet the Transform-ERs series is showcasing our tactical team of partners working to revolutionise retrofit. For our next instalment, we’re catching up with Steve Nesbitt from the Manufacturing Technology Centre to hear about its role in Transform-ER as "the manufacturing moderniser” and how the project's new 'Define the Need' report explores why we need to transform the retrofit market, and what this could look like.
Its expertise in modernising the construction sector is key to our mission to industrialise retrofit, as is its expertise in ensuring that lessons are learned from other sectors and the industry is properly supported to make this shift.
The Manufacturing Technology Centre (the MTC) is a research organisation that’s part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, established by and working in partnership with Innovate UK.
We play a crucial role in industrial transformation by focusing on key future manufacturing technologies and transferring research findings to the sector.
The UK is a hotbed of innovation, but we have, at times, failed to exploit these advances and missed out on economic, social and environmental benefits. The UK Government set up the Catapult Network to catalyse innovations and de-risk their journeys towards being fully developed into industrialised solutions for wider deployment.
The UK is a hotbed of innovation, but we have, at times, failed to exploit these advances
Retrofit is currently achieving around £1bn worth of delivery per year. We believe that its potential market value is in the order of £20 – 60bn. It’s a massive opportunity for growth but organic growth is currently too slow and too siloed.
Retrofit's organic growth is too slow and too siloed
Transform-ER’s ambition for systemic change is monumental in my opinion. The rich blend of consortium members – from local authorities to manufacturers - means we have everybody that’s needed to create a more data-led, digitally enabled, effective sector.
We recognised that our previous work leading large-scale construction innovation initiatives would be well-placed to support this journey, the Construction Innovation Hub being a prime example.
This was focused on learning from other manufacturing sectors and bringing those to bear in the design, development and deployment of construction projects – particularly for schools, hospitals and other civic buildings.
It demonstrated how a manufacturing-led approach could improve the speed and quality of construction in the industry. And we could really see how a platform construction system approach – which comprises standardised kits-of-parts and a rulebook underpinning their use - would be of value to the retrofit market.
We think this is key to attaining the speed and scale we need to achieve our net zero targets and reap the social and economic benefits of wide-scale home energy refurbishment.
Transform-ER is adopting the Construction Innovation Hub’s ‘Demand, Develop, Deploy’ approach to create a cohesive, industrialised sector that delivers high-performance, cost-effective solutions through a standardised process.
It’s different from new build that’s for sure, due to retrofit’s more complex nature!
We have 29 million homes in the UK, most of which will need some form of retrofitting by 2050. There’s a huge variation across the housing stock and no two homes, even if the plans were the same, are identical.. It might be minor - a brick out of place or a window slightly out of position – or it might be more fundamental, like an extension.
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We know that by aggregating demand and applying technology, we can start to develop standardised kits-of-parts to enable us to produce large-scale volumes of common solutions to be applied to different archetypes.
These can then have custom-made components to account for small anomalies or larger renovations. We’re calling it ‘Manufacturing-Led retrofit.’
By aggregating demand and applying technology, we can start to develop kits-of-parts...we're calling it 'Manufacturing-Led retrofit'
One of our key project deliverables is the “Retrofit Rulebook”, which will detail the interoperability rules and standards, as well as key insights from the delivery model developed by the consortium. It will provide clear guidance to other industry actors seeking to understand how to reach retrofit at scale.
With such huge untapped market value for retrofit, the rulebook can support both existing and new entrants to the market – mitigating risk with a standardised approach.
We’ve started this process by creating a ‘Define the Need’ report for the rulebook. In previous projects we found that creating a shared approach that met the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders was, understandably, challenging!
Our response was to listen to these different stakeholders and understand their differing needs and then go away and unify these into a narrower range of requirements. All parties agreed with this approach, so we adopted it again for this rulebook.
As well as exploring why we need transformation in the sector – and what this could look like – the report dives deep into concepts we think are vital to retrofit at scale including a platform approach, systems engineering, interoperability and manufacturing-led solutions.
It analyses the market opportunity for retrofit through a five-step process and its key highlights include:
Retrofitting rates sit at 6% of what is needed to achieve Government targets
Embrace the Retrofit Rulebook as a starting point! Will it be the finished article that’s applicable for every retrofit project in the world? No, it can’t be, but it aims to be the best first draft for curated and aggregated knowledge from leading stakeholders in the retrofit marketplace already.
And there’s a call to action for us as well – we need to design it to be a singular repository which grows with the sector, enriched by continuous improvement, added content and shared learning. This will include finding the right owner for it.
Retrofit is a 'wicked problem' ... and the only way to deal with these is a collaborative, community-based approach
Retrofit is what is known as a ‘wicked problem’ – one with multiple stakeholders, no clear-cut answers and layer upon layer of complexity. And the only way to deal with these is to have a collaborative, community-based approach.
The Transform-ER consortium is a community and has the range of expertise needed to tackle the retrofit challenge. But for large-scale adoption, we need other communities to embrace our shared mission and develop it further – and we hope you will do just that.
Read our 5 key insights from the Define the Need report.
Read the summary version of the Define the Need report: https://bit.ly/dtn-summary
Read the full version: https://bit.ly/definetheneedreport
